Four nations and a funeral: the demise of the British welfare state

Today sees the transformation of the British welfare system, combining crippling cuts to benefits with the full blown marketisation of England's NHS. This is Cameron's "compassionate conservatism". Scotland and the UK must find a different way.

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The British welfare state is meant to be
one of the ties that bind us together; along with the NHS and the BBC
representing our common strands of citizenship.

Each has been remarkably eroded in recent
years but on Monday April 1st huge changes will occur in the first
two - the welfare state and NHS in England
– which will have massive consequences for hundreds of thousands of people up
and down this country already hard pressed and vulnerable, and for the very
idea of Britain
itself.

A host of benefit changes are about to
occur: the bedroom tax, the abolition of Disability Living Allowance, the
housing benefit cap and a real cut in most benefits. At the same time, there
will be the biggest overhaul of
the NHS in England
in decades, with private health care providers the world over drooling at the
prospect of getting their hands on the NHS billions.

This is not the mandate David Cameron and
Ian Duncan Smith stood on in 2010. Cameron impressed on people that he was a
different kind of ‘compassionate conservative’, stressing the perils of
inequality and poverty, and citing the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate
Pickett’s influential ‘The Spirit Level’.

Iain Duncan Smith professed his
understanding and empathy of Easterhouse and its people, and women in
particular. But everything the two have done post-2010 has been to return to
type and worse.

The bedroom tax will affect 660,000
households across the UK,
who will lose an average of £14 per week. In Scotland, according to Scottish
Government research, when house building is at a 51 year low, 105,000
households will be affected. Eight out of ten households which it impacts upon
have a disabled adult; 16,000 families affected have a child; this when
according to the recent Breadline
Britain study 29% of Scots live in poverty and cannot afford the basic
essentials of life.

The abolition of the Disability Living Allowance
will see outsourcers Atos incentivised in a £400 million contract to remove
500,000 people from the new benefit: personal independent payments.

This is the climate in which this week the
Poverty Alliance held their Poverty Assembly, bringing together hundreds of
diverse, angry voices from the most disadvantaged and poorest parts of Scotland.

Nichola Sadler and Hazel Ratcliffe are two
young mothers from Fife. Nichola told of how
after becoming, through no fault of her own, a single mother she felt she was
‘judged’ and ‘looked down upon’ at the job centre, and her ‘get up and go’
attitude and pride ignored.

Hazel told of the anxieties and wearisome
pressures of managing financially day to day on benefits with kids. She told of
how she planned and budgeted, and then would be thrown by the unexpected
happening, when her son’s shoes wore out and she had no means to buy
replacements.

Their accounts are ones of dignity and taking
control of their lives but Scotland
sadly isn’t as different from the rest of the UK as we like to think. In 1983 46%
of Scots thought benefits were too low; today that figure stands at a mere 26%.

What we do have is Labour and SNP posturing
on the bedroom tax and how best to oppose it. This directly helps no one and
looks like plain naked posturing in face of the onslaught people are about to
face.

Margaret Burgess, Minister for Housing and
Welfare Reform, addressed the Poverty Assembly on Monday, and told people that
‘Scotland
was a rich country’. All fine, but when asked to do something she responded
that ‘Scotland
didn’t have that many wealthy people’ and so we couldn’t do something such as
raising the council tax top levels.

Instead, she told us, flying in the face of
evidence, that the council tax freeze was ‘progressive’ and offered little
action or coherence. Actually, Scotland
could act if it wanted: we could unite to prevent evictions from the bedroom
tax, and we could implement our own version of the mansion tax, asking the
better off to contribute more at this time of crisis.

Part of Scotland doesn’t want to act but
just grandstand. Other parts are even worse. One very senior health
professional told me that ‘there was no interest in Scotland in structural change’ and
that we should all just look to inner change: effectively a voice of complacent
retreat and passivity.

Then there was the recent ‘GPs at the Deep
End’ report which was drawn together from Glasgow East End GPs. What radical
call to arms did this well-intentioned and timely gathering propose? Amazingly,
suggestions of additional time with GPs for patients, serial encounters between
the two, better connections across the front line, learning and leadership.

Frankly this is barely adequate as a
response to anything but training accreditation and looks thirty years out of
date. People are facing hardship, demonisation and an ideological onslaught,
and tidy service reconfiguration isn’t going to stop it while our GPs get more
depoliticised, and even in Scotland
act as small autonomous businesses.

Adrian Sinfield reflected at the Poverty
Assembly that ‘the welfare state as we know it’ is effectively dead, the Fabian
good news story of the march of progress through the end of the Poor Laws to
Beveridge and enlightenment is over and now in reverse gear.

Britain has become a land of harsh
judgements, punitive measures and decisions towards those most vulnerable, with
a narrow, nasty populism on welfare which mixes the worst of human emotions
about insecurities, people getting benefits they don’t deserve, and immigration
fears.

The British welfare state came of age in
that moment of the Second World War where the British people collectively
decided to create a different future, and as the fate of the war perilously
shifted from the Germans and Japanese to Allies, affirmed in the Beveridge
Report and subsequent debates, that we wished to define ourselves by how we
looked after each other.

That was a long time ago and those
principles and attitudes no longer seem to shape Britain. Instead, we now have an
increasingly fragmented, bitter, divided country, and the slow, painful demise
of the British dream of the welfare state and, in England, the NHS.

We have to take a stand against this now,
and where we can in Scotland,
mitigate, oppose and present a different way. That means challenging our
politicians, political debate and public services to do better and rise above
the ‘business as usual’ or, even worse, business model of development. This is
a defining point for Scotland
and the four nations of the UK.